Tuning BlueDragon should generally involve the same practices and techniques used with ColdFusion.

You should carefully consider all the settings in the BlueDragon Admin console. The defaults may require tuning in your environment (such as the default of 3 for each datasource's "maximum connections", or the file cache size of 60, or the "max heap size" of 128k in the Java editions).

Note as well that BlueDragon offers some advantages in performance reporting, over CFMX, in that there are several "runtime state" reports in the BlueDragon Admin console, for both the entire server, each datasource, and the file/template cache. These reports can help identify bottlenecks, as well as help you determine the correct values to enter for the Admin console settings.

Of course, nearly any CFML application will benefit from judicious use of caching, whether query caching (CFQUERY CACHEDWITHIN and CACHEDAFTER and BlueDragon enhancements), page output caching (CFCACHE), partial page caching (BlueDragon's own CFCACHECONTENT). A good primer on CFML caching techniques is Caching in ColdFusion, by Matt Boles at Macromedia. (Note that if you use or are interested in Brandon Purcell's CF_Accelerate tag, we support that as well.)

Finally, as for configuring the environment (OS, web server, DBMS), we don't have any specific performance tuning recommendations for BlueDragon, but again some of the common techniques recommended for ColdFusion would apply. There have been several such resources posted by Macromedia. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the recommendations there and whether they apply to BlueDragon or in your environment, we're happy to discuss them with you.

Additionally, there are some .NET-specific aspects to consider for those running the .NET edition of BlueDragon. The final chapter of the manual, Deploying CFML on ASP.NET, lists several generic .NET resources, including some focused on .NET tuning. We will also be adding more information (there or in a technote) elaborating on such issues of particular interest to CFML developers.